Issue 66 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online.
From the editor
Articles
Roman Polanski: What's on Trial?
By Karin Luisa Badt
Looking at Charlie: Modern Times
An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
"Buck up! Never say die! We’ll get along!"
By Alan Vanneman
Past Sunset: Noir in the West
"I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me."
By Imogen Sara Smith
On the Escarpment, Off the Escarpment: It Helps When the Love Is Strong
Especially when the lovers aren't
By D. J. M. Saunders
Porno to the People: The Danish Revolution That Liberated America
"Tease was out, honesty was in."
By Jack Stevenson
The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual
"We keep returning to this story about pod people because we're terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era."
By Jesse Stommel
The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover: Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover
How a movie exposé of "abuse of power" defends those in power and their institutions
By Jay Rothermel
Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah
"In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality — and its alternate currents — is caught with a glance."
By Rob Faunce
Can't Repeat the Past? Of Course You Can't — and Shouldn't
Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century
By Suzanne del Gizzo
Blake Edwards vs. Hollywood: Sunset and the Myth of Hollywood's Golden Age
A tour of Edwards' curious 1988 film, with side trips to variations by James Ivory, John Schlesinger, and others
By Barry Wurst II
Actors
Delphine Seyrig: The Eternal Return
"Seyrig is capable of stopping an entire film with one decisive physical gesture, one smile, one glare, one sound from her smoky, murmuring voice."
By Dan Callahan
Sean Connery: A "Natural Thrust"
"Connery, never a martyr to false modesty, remains as voluble and combative as ever."
By Christopher Sandford
Directors
Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men
"I'm shitting bricks, thinking he's onto me."
By Damon Smith
Film and Film and Film: An Interview with Jonas Mekas
"One who knows how to, as they say, 'read' the images, can tell everything about me."
By Jon Lanthier
Columns
Bright Sights: Play Time, Gaumont Treasures, Diary for My Children, Winstanley, Marlene, Bill Douglas Trilogy
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
By Gordon Thomas
Letter from New York (c. 1980)
"The problem is other people — crazy people."
By Howard Mandelbaum
Movies
Film Kills: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 1
"Tarantino thus concedes some of his omnipotence to the medium he so deftly manipulates."
By Vlad Dima
"Do You Find Me Sadistic?" Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 2
"This is the World War II film confronting its Jungian shadow, acknowledging its darkest impulses and finally purging them."
By Lee Weston Sabo
Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
"His plan mirrors Johnny's, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place.""
By Robert Castle
Critical Distance: What Knowing Knows About 9/11
"Where Cloverfield provocatively blurs the line between being 'about' 9/11 and being (mere) entertainment, Knowing lands squarely in the latter camp."
By Devan Goldstein
Playing It Safe with John Dillinger: Michael Mann's Public Enemies
"Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery to alter his face and to try to remove his fingerprints. But Public Enemies does not dare to depict that kind of desperation and that determination to survive under any circumstances."
By Joan McGettigan
"They Come in Peace": Andy Fickman's Race to Witch Mountain
"Only saviors can save polluted planets, yellow cab drivers are losers . . ."
By Jay Rothermel
Far from Elementary: Debra Chasnoff's Straightlaced: How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up
"I told him, 'I'm not gay. My neck was cold.'"
By Gary Morris
Festivals
After the Surge: The 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival
"An alternative agenda for the festival might be: what can we make of modernism?"
By Lesley Chow
Bucking the Tide: The 2009 New York Film Festival
This year's strong, idiosyncratic line-up reminds us that moviegoing can still be more than "a museum experience"
By Megan Ratner
Lucky 13: The 2009 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
Getting out of the ghetto
By Gary Morris
From Air Dolls to the Anchorage: The 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival
"VIFF remains the unspoiled oasis for cinephiles looking to get away from it all."
By Ben Cho
Books
In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by Chris Welles Feder.
By Joseph McBride
Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Politot
By Jon Lanthier
America’s Film Vault: A Reference Guide to the Motion Pictures Held by the U.S. National Archives, by Phillip W. Stewart
By Matthew Kennedy
Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor, by Dan North
By Deborah Allison
3 comments:
Wow, awesome job! Loved the Manny Farber piece! I didn't know that book was out. Lanthier's review jubilantly captures the feel of Farber! x
Thanks, Erich! "Farber on Film" is definitely the must-buy film book of the year, me thinks.
I found Robert Castle's piece on Kubrick's The Killing on shakey ground:
1. Jim Thomson's contribution to the script is ignored, and there is a strong argument that the Maurice/Johnny scene owes more to Thomson than to Kubrick.
2. There is no evidence that Kubrick was consciously using noir conventions. Raymond Borde's and Étienne Chaumeton's A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953, published in France in 1955, was not translated into English until 2000 (though there is a photo of Robert Aldrich holding a copy of the French edition on the set of Kiss Me Deadly (1955)).
3. The Killing owes too much to The Asphalt Jungle and Dassin's Rififi (1955) to be seen as a major work.
4. It is a stretch to see The Killing as a noir - it is more of a caper gone wrong movie with noir pretensions.
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